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The best of them were drawn from the upper parts of the colony, where habits of bushranging were still in full activity. Their fighting qualities were much like those of the Indians, whom they rivalled in endurance and in the arts of forest war.
Some present were of coarse calibre bushranging sons of seigneurs and petty nobles, dashing and profane, and something barbarous; but most had gifts of person and speech, and all seemed capable. My spirits continued high. I sprang alertly to meet wit and gossip, my mind ran nimbly here and there, I filled the role of honoured guest. But when came the table and wine, a change befell me.
The occasional deficiency of local colour and loss of effect in the grouping of the characters is more than compensated for by the racy piquancy of Dick Marston's vernacular, and the aspect, unrivalled in Australian literature, which his account affords of bushranging life from the bushranger's own point of view.
"I have not breath to tell you all that we suffered while getting towards the bushranging haunts; our days of hunger and wretchedness our adventures with the natives, and their attempts to kill us the desperate risks which we ran of being captured and taken back to prison and last of all, our reaching this hut, which is to be the scene of my death.
Starlight, though he is not, and cannot be, a portrait of any single colonial outlaw of real life, is sufficiently natural to consistently represent in both his conduct and adventures much that was typical of Australian bushranging forty years ago and later.
Bushranging, properly so called, had been extinguished by the goldfind in Victoria, but as my brothers had located themselves as far as possible from inhabited districts, Boola Boola was still on the extreme border of civilisation, and there was a long, wide mountain valley, called the Red Valley, beyond it, with long gulleys and ravines branching up in endless ramifications, where a gang of runaway shepherds and unsuccessful gold diggers were known to haunt, and were almost certainly the robbers.
We had been telling each other stories which we had heard or read of bushranging exploits, until we were all as nervous as possible. Ghosts, or even burglar stories, are nothing to the horror of a true bushranger story, and F had made himself particularly ghastly and disagreeable by giving a minute account of an adventure which had been told to him by one of the survivors.
They petitioned the English Government to allow him to stay for another six years; and when the reply was given that this could not be done, as Colonel Sorell was required elsewhere, they presented him with a handsome testimonial, and settled on him an income of £500 a year from their own revenues. Governor Arthur.# After Colonel Sorell had left, bushranging became as troublesome as ever.
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